CFMIP-GCSS meeting in Vancouver, June 2009

See the CFMIP website for the announcement. The programme and talks are available from here . Many thanks to Phil Austin for hosting the meeting. We would also like to acknowledge the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science for their financial support.

Outcomes of particular relevance to the GCSS BLclouds working group

• GCSS-CFMIP case study: see case description . Minghua Zhang presented results from many (~10) SCM and 3 LES (although one was 2D and resolutions were quite coarse). If anything, the SCM appeared more consistent than the LES, at least in terms of equilibrium mean profiles, but it seems several models had problems with drift in the free atmosphere (leading to weakening/strengthening of the inversion). Minghua's plan is to address these issues in the set-up, rerun and hold a focussed workshop in December 2009 (TBC) for participants to present detailed investigations into their model's behaviour.
• RICO LES: Pier Siebesma and Louise Nuijens presented work on a revised draft of the LES paper, that should be circulated to co-authors very soon.
• RICO SCM: ideas for the content of a paper were discussed in some detail: Pier and Roel Neggers agreed to take this forward into a skeleton draft over the next few months.
• Stratocu to Cu Lagrangians:
  • Irina Sandu has examined thousands of transitions in satellite data. Combined with reanalysis there seems to be a pretty consistent picture that should lend itself to a composite case, perhaps also sampling the pdf of forcings using an ensemble approach.
  • Stephan de Roode has been revisiting the ASTEX Lagrangian intercomparison case (Bretherton et al, 1999) and plans an updated intercomparison under the EUCLIPSE proposal in which it is hoped GCSS people will participate.
  • The view at the meeting was that these two approaches were complimentary and could proceed in parallel.
• There were interesting discussions around both the VOCALS and POST stratocumulus observational campaigns. Amongst many other things, these look like they will provide valuable data for a future GCSS intercomparison case